As part of a new two-year project, Wiki Education is pleased to introduce the seven members of our Medical Community Advisory Committee. The committee, which brings together educators from across health professions fields, will advise and engage with our work to improve Wikipedia’s coverage of health-related topics.
“The sheer number of eyeballs looking to Wikipedia for health-related information is staggering,” said committee lead Amin Azzam, MD. “Helping health professions school faculty to implement Wikipedia editing assignments into their local contexts is far more impactful than my direct teaching of my own students. Getting this information on Wikipedia will help everyone who reads Wikipedia for their own or their loved ones’ health.”
During their two-year term, committee members will collaborate with Wiki Education across key areas of the project, including outreach and recruitment. Working with Wiki Education staff, the scholars will expand faculty awareness of the Wikipedia assignment through outreach to health professions networks, partnership development with organizations and institutions, and support for Teaching with Wikipedia webinars.
“Ever since taking a Wikipedia-editing course as a medical student, I’ve been passionate about improving health-related content on Wikipedia; whether through designing courses or encouraging colleagues to get involved,” said second-year ophthalmology resident Tolga Guven, MD. “I firmly believe in the open-access movement and that motivation should be the only barrier to acquiring knowledge. The opportunity to work alongside and learn from like-minded educators while helping improve one of the world’s most-referenced information sources was one I couldn’t resist.”
The group will also assist with a study led by Azzam to investigate the impact that editing Wikipedia has on health professions student editors. Committee members will support survey design and focus group framework development.
“This work excites me for two main reasons: one, the educational opportunity it presents for health professional students; and two, its potential to improve public health,” explained Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s Sheila Kusnoor, PhD. “Participating in Wikipedia editing courses gives students the chance to learn how to identify high-quality evidence and clearly communicate it to a lay audience. These skills are critical, as patients need access to reliable, easy-to-understand health information to make informed decisions about their care. Enhancing the quality of health information on Wikipedia can help empower patients with the knowledge needed to improve their health.”
2025 Medical Community Advisory Committee members:
Mohammad Aldalou, MD is a postdoctoral scholar at the Marnix E. Heersink School of Medicine at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB). In 2021, he founded OMEN-Palestine, the Palestinian chapter affiliated with Osmosis from Elsevier, where he led efforts to expand access to medical education resources for students and early-career physicians in the region. He also served as a regional lead and consultant with Osmosis from Elsevier, focusing on competency development and student engagement within the medical education program. At UAB, Dr. Aldalou’s research centers on formative assessment and competency-based medical education. His research interest lies in leveraging learning analytics to track student progress and inform the design of more effective and personalized educational experiences.
Amin Azzam, MD is a passionate health professions educator-innovator. He loves leveraging technologies that maximize learners’ capacities to become the awesome health professionals we all want in society. He is a professor at three San Francisco Bay Area universities: University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine; University of California, Berkeley School of Public Health; and Samuel Merritt University. He’s also a consultant to several health education technology companies.
Tanya Cupino, MD, PhD is a recent graduate of Loma Linda University. She has a PhD in microbiology and molecular genetics and a professional interest in adult patients with rare genetic conditions. In 2019, while still in medical school, she volunteered to participate in an international, asynchronous Wikipedia editing course that was sponsored by the medical learning platform Osmosis. After learning how to edit Wikipedia, Dr. Cupino collaborated with Dr. Guven and Dr. Azzam in designing an online course that teaches healthcare students how to improve the health content on Wikipedia. Dr. Cupino contributed to peer-reviewed publications that explore the multifactorial value-added outcomes in teaching healthcare professional students to edit Wikipedia, and has presented similar findings at research conferences. She is passionate about supporting any efforts to ensure trustworthy, approachable, fact-based resources that patients can freely access when they have questions about health concerns.
Scott Ewing, DO is an Interventional Cardiologist and medical educator in Fort Worth, Texas. Previously, he was a mechanical engineering manager at Texas Instruments in Dallas, Texas. He is board-certified in internal medicine, general cardiology, and interventional cardiology. He is an Assistant Professor and clinical preceptor at the Burnett School of Medicine at TCU. Additionally, he is an Assistant Professor at the University of North Texas Health Science Center Texas College of Osteopathic Medicine, where he teaches several cardiology classes, serves as 3rd-year Internal Medicine clerkship director, and teaches the TCOM WikiMed class twice yearly.
Tolga Guven, MD is a second-year ophthalmology resident in the U.K. and currently works as the Simulation Fellow for the Wessex Deanery where he is responsible for coordinating the surgical simulation education for the other residents in the region. As part of this fellowship, he is undertaking a PGCert in Healthcare Education. Dr. Guven previously served as a Histology and Embryology Lector at Charles University from 2017-2020, where his passion to make complex medical information more understandable and accessible began. Following on from this experience, he collaborated with Dr. Azzam on designing an online Wikipedia-editing course for healthcare students, which aims to improve the quality and accuracy of medical information available to the public. Dr. Guven brings a unique perspective to medical education, coming from a niche clinical specialty, with a commitment to accessible knowledge dissemination.
Sheila Kusnoor, PhD is a Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC) and holds roles as Senior Information Scientist and Associate Director for Research at the Center for Knowledge Management (CKM). Dr. Kusnoor earned her Ph.D. in cellular and molecular neuroscience from Vanderbilt University. She began her career at CKM as a Knowledge Management Fellow in Personalized Medicine, aiming to cultivate expertise in informatics and information science. In her current role, Dr. Kusnoor leads and supports a variety of projects to advance VUMC priorities, applying expertise in knowledge management and informatics. Dr. Kusnoor is the course director for the WikiMed advanced elective, which teaches third- and fourth-year medical students how to identify high quality evidence to enhance Wikipedia medicine articles.
Maureen Richards, PhD is an immunology and microbiology educator. She has been working with the Wikipedia Platform as a course director for the past 9 years and has run 7 courses with over 100 total students. She currently serves as the Assistant Dean of Medical Education and Evaluation and Associate Professor at the University of Illinois College of Medicine Rockford Campus.
We encourage any interested instructor to visit teach.wikiedu.org to learn more about incorporating a Wikipedia assignment into their courses with Wiki Education’s free support and resources.
This project is funded through a Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) Eugene Washington PCORI Engagement Award (EADI #38991).
